Don’t Make These Five Web Design Mistakes

Using Flash on your homepage is just about the biggest mistake you can make in web design. Your visitors will not be that impressed with your beautiful Flash site so don’t waste your time and money with this. They want information about your products and services and most couldn’t care less that you have a Flash site – many will leave without even seeing what you have to offer.


Not all of your visitors will have mega broadband connections and what will appear quickly to some will take an age for others and will more than likely have them clicking the back button through frustration. Give people what they want straight away as that is what they are expecting and it would be stupid to disappoint them wouldn’t it? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


Don’t create your site with links to everything under the sun on each page like a catalog and you will avoid mistake number two. This is the “show them all you’ve got scenario" where website owners believe that if they display all of their offers they will make more sales. Nothing could be further from the truth.


Many Internet marketing studies have revealed that where the visitor is presented with too many choices they end up making none. This has been linked with information overload which you want to avoid at all costs. A better solution is to create categories for your products and a good search facility so that your visitors can find what they are looking for.


Creating a site that the top search engines Yahoo, Bing and Google can’t find is the third biggest mistake that you can make with web design. Many will tell you that your message to your visitors is much more important than worrying about the search engines. It is true that your visitors should be your priority, but it is also fairly easy to optimize your content for the search engines as well.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. Assume that most people are typing in “Plumber In London". It’s then just a simple matter of optimizing your site for this search term. The term needs to appear in your title, in the main body of your content a number of times and in your site description. By doing this you will provide assistance to the search engines and they will understand that you are offering plumbing services in London.


A very common mistake, and number four in this article, is loading your site with too many pictures. The more images you have, the more likely you are to avert your visitor’s attention from your core message and your page will be slow. You could end up getting your site penalized in the top search engines if you have too many images. Online research companies have found that a web site has around seven seconds to satisfy its readers. Having too many images could mean that your site takes longer than seven seconds to load and your visitors will be hitting the back button in their droves.


Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. Your web site should be your shop window where you want people to buy what you have to offer, contact you for more information or join your email newsletter list for further communications. You can get your web designer to produce a fancy design but write the content yourself or hire a good copywriter to do this.